The Captains Log

The Captains Log 7/11

System: E1UU-3; Esoteria

Station: La Fabbrichetta del Papi

 

Solution to sov the problem:.
0.0 alliances need to start griefing the hell out of everyone who lives in empire space until they beg CCP to improve 0.0 enough that we go away. Then we’ll see some worthwhile changes

~ From the Eve-O forums.

— CCP has revised some of the upkeep system which can be found in this post. —

Well that DevBlog a lot of us have being waiting for has being released and it has made a lot of people cry (11 pages on the Eve-O forums so far). So here are the important parts

• Corporations are going to be paying the fees to hold sov over a system
• To just hold sov in one system it will cost 600 mill a month
• To get basic infrastructure it will cost 900 mill a month
• To get the full set of strategic infrastructure it will cost 2 billion a month
• You will be able to pay bills automatically

 

A lot of the crying is to do with threee things

• It costs a lot of ISK to own Sov and it is too high
• The upgrades are crap as they are improving aspects of the game which are already broken, therefore nothing is being improved.
• This makes it just as hard for small alliances to get into 0.0

 

Well I have to agree with the fact that the upgrades are not great and that CCP could have done a better job with them. I will also agree with the fact that they could have a done a better job with working out the costs associated with owning space such as a introducing a scaling system of payment (1 systems costs 10 mill/day, owning 2 costs 15 mill/day etc). However, the cost of owning sov is only high if you are looking at as an individualistic effort. It would take 10 people earning 7 mill a day to pay the bills for a fully upgraded system or 3 mill a day for just sov and the infrastructure hub. Additionally, there will still be moon minerals to be mined as only the dysprosium and promethium moons are being nerfed and they will still be worth a lot, just not the cash cows they are now. Also if alliances started to react moon materials instead of just mining and selling them a bit more profit could be made. What it all comes down to is corporations getting their members to actually contribute to helping the corporation exist, effectively forcing corporations to become leaner and meaner in regards to their member base as they only take on players who are willing to contribute the goals of the corporation. In others words Dominion will force people to work together for a collective goal instead of individually (something that goes against the western philosophy of individualism).

Related to this is the claim that the systems can’t support the 50-100 people like CCP wants them to. Well they can. Just not all at once. This number has to be spread over 23 hours of playing time and then you can see how a system can support that many people. Of course this opens up problems for corporations that are based out of one time zone. Also corps that are based over multiple times zone will find it harder to defend their space as their full numbers won’t be available at any given time.

Of course the part I find interesting is how the internal alliance politics are going to work now. As it is now you normally have one corp controlling all the good moons and holding on to the sov of the systems the alliance controls and using the moon goo to pay the expenses of running the towers. Naturally, this corporation will normally be the one in charge of the alliance with the alliance leader being based out of this corporation. This will be changing once Dominion hits as it will be a lot harder for a single corporation to hold sov for a entire alliance due to the costs associated with it and the pain in the arse it would be to get ISK out of the other corporations in the alliance (you have to get the ISK twice, once from the players and then from the corporations). Therefore it makes a lot more sense to give corporations certain systems they control and to look after. Now if you put all this effort into your corporations systems will you want other members from your alliance coming into your corporations systems and sponging off your corps hard work when they have their own systems to use? No you won’t. It will be interesting to see how alliances will deal with this issue. Additionally, I think this will give corporations more power within a alliance so that the smaller corps won’t all be bowing to the largest one as the smaller coprs will be getting their ISK from their own players and not off the corp that controls all the moons. This coupled with the fact that the corporations will be holding sov themselves could give more independence to corporations inside an alliance. Where could corporate independence lead? Rebellion.

If the changes stated in the DevBlog stay as they are, I think we will see three things happening. 1. The space held by alliances will shrink 2. Alliances, and in particular, corporations will shrink in size so that they consist of a highly motivated member base and 3. You will see corporations breaking away from their mother alliances as they grow more independent. This will effectively fragment the current 0.0 alliances and make them smaller. What will this do? Open the way for new alliances into 0.0 that do not currently have the manpower to take space from the major powerblocks. It won’t happen immediately or maybe even the first year. But I think it may be the way of the future.

Tags: Dominion, Upkeep System

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 1:59 pm and is filed under New Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.